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Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes

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This is really like two different books in one. The first part, that covers the math of Archimedes and his other accomplishments, is rather dry and the author almost seems bored by it. The second part, which focuses on the Archimedes Palimpsest (also covered in a recent book titled the Archimedes Codex), feels as if it were written by a different author, someone who was genuinely excited about his subject and is expressing that in his writing style. So if you find yourself getting bogged down in part I, at least give part II a try before giving up entirely.

This book's subtitle, "The Life and Legacy of Archimedes", actually understates what the book fully contains. In addition to a biography of Archimedes and a summary of his incredible legacy, the author has also included the remarkably tumultuous journey of the so-called Archimedes Palimpsest: a book containing faint reproductions of some of Archimedes's writings. These words and diagrams, of a mathematical nature, were partly erased from their parchment in medieval times so that the same parchment could be re-used for other texts. Fortunately, modern technology was successfully applied to restore the legibility of the original content.

Only about half this book focuses on Archimedes, his incredible accomplishments and what little is known of his personal life. The remainder contains a short history of writing, of writing implements and techniques, of the repeated transcribing of ancient texts over centuries and millennia, and, of course, the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest. The writing style is clear, authoritative, very accessible and quite captivating. Although any general reader can enjoy this book, it would likely be relished the most by science/math buffs as well as those fascinated by how very ancient writings have made their way into the modern world.

Alan Hirschfeld is a professor of physics by day, but does a good job of moonlighting as a historian for this examination of Archimedes and his work.

Reaching back over 2200 years to the Sicily Archimedes knew, he creates the environment in which the mathematician lived and worked. During a brief period of peace and prosperity for his city of Syracuse, Archimedes created the basis for geometry, mathematically defied pii, and the mechanism of leavers (and more!). He was heralded as a genius by his scientific contemporys and as a savior for his inventive weapons and defense mechanisms by his countrymen. The legend most people know is of him jumping out of a bathtub in the excitement of discovering the concept of water displaced equal to the weight of the submerged object. This arose from him devising a way to detect base metals substituted for gold in a commissioned piece for the king.

Part One describes what is known of the man, the era in which he lived, and his work. The reader is guided through the mathematical theroms with a light guiding hand, and a clear style that the non-mathematician will appreciate.

Part Two traces the tract of this visionary's work to the modern day. Along the journey we learn the microeconomics of papyrus scroll production, its relatively short lifespan, and the industry of manuscript copying that kept Archimedes work alive. In the mid 9th century, under the direction of a Byzantine librarian named Leo, his work is compiled from separate scrolls into three parchment codex (early book forms). Already over 1000 years after the life of Archimedes, these three codex form the root of all subsequent copies of his work. Three hundred years later, one of the codex is erased and overwritten with an orthodox liturgical guide to Easter services. The overwritten work (palimpsest) is re-discovered in the early 20th century, and is the only one to survive to the 21st century. The other two were discovered by the scientists of the renaissance who again heralded this ancient Greek as a genius, upon who's work modern mathematics is based.

Hirschfeld draws a direct line through history to trace the discoveries and survival of Archimedes work. While he apparently veers off at a tangent at times, it is only to better illustrate the journey taken.

The ideas and engines of Archimedes have inspired centuries of innovation. Despite the years, religious and scientific tumults and crimes of history, Archimedes has lessons to teach us, even today. He freely shared his ideas with the greatest minds of his age... but kept the greatest secret - HOW he came about his proofs - to himself until his end.

2300 years ago, Archimedes showed the people of today not only how powerful ideas survive the ages, but how to create distinction, idiosyncrasies, individuality and security with them.

Hirshfeld's book is a great read that transported me though centuries and destinations reminiscent of an Indiana Jones / Da Vinci Code romp without needing the artificial exigencies of Hollywood to doll-up an already intriguing tale. I highly recommend it.

Note: I was a little let down by the Kindle conversion. Extraneous gaps, odd hyphenation, Drop-caps at the beginning of chapters that were treated like isolated letters... These formatting errors should be revised, as it detracted from my ability to completely immerse myself in the story. I hope the powers that be get an opportunity to get the prose looking as good as the praise :)

I am a big fan of Hirshfeld's book on Michael Faraday, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday. I hoped for an equally excellent experience with this biography of Archimedes. Perhaps my expectations were a little high. Though a solid, interesting book, it doesn't quite reach as high a level.

The main thing that threw me off was the fact that only about half of this short book is really a biography of Archimedes, which is what I was looking for. This is not a surprise, perhaps, given how little is known of his life. And Hirshfeld does give some nice descriptions of Archimedes' work. His explanations of Archimedes' method of calculating pi and the story of The Sand-Reckoner are particularly good. I also liked the explanation of the law of levers (especially as exposition of Archimedes' method), though this is tough going for someone who doesn't already understand something of the physics. Still, I felt a little mislead by the title and I thought I was getting something other than what I got.

In fact, the last half of this book is the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest. The Palimpsest (for those who missed the story in the news a few years back or have never visited the website) is an ancient manuscript of Archimedes' works hidden beneath the pages of a liturgical book. Discovered for the first time in the opening years of the twentieth century, in its pages were found not only works already known but also the only known versions of some of Archimedes' writings. It was and remains an awesome discovery and a revealing view into Archimedes' work.

Hirshfeld does a nice job of taking us through what is known of the document and its various appearances through the twentieth century up to the present day. Certainly, it is a story worth telling and a fascinating one to someone, like myself, who is interested in books as objects in and of themselves. Somehow, however, I got the feeling that this was two very separate books brought together by the name Archimedes. I think I would rather have seen both parts expanded and published as two separate books. Still, as it is, there is a lot of valuable information here.

The short version:

Eureka Man is, very broadly, three stories: The man and his milieu (mostly his milieu - see closing paragraph), his contributions and influence, and the utterly amazing & fortuitous chain of events over the last 2200 years whereby we today know of the first two.

For those in a hurry, I can whole-heartedly recommend Eureka Man on all three counts: This is the best concise summary of Archimedes' world and work that I know of - all the detail you need; nothing that you don't. The longer third story - about 1/2 of the book - was for me a complete delight. The amazing twists & turns of fate by which we know even a little of this brilliant man - a story that is still unfolding with the recent re-discovery & recovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest (or Codex). And if that weren't enough, Hirshfeld has a genuine ear for language. The writing is lively and fun, a pleasure to read.

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For those who want a more detailed synopsis, read on . . .

Hirshfeld devotes the first half of the book to the first two stories: The Greco-Roman world of the 3rd Century BC, when the Greek city-states of the Greek peninsula & Italy (including Sicily), and the post-Alexandrian Hellenistic kingdoms of Egypt & modern Turkey were steadily losing their autonomy to Rome. Archimedes' life & work were intimately bound up in this tumultuous transitional period - he studied in Alexandria & corresponded regularly with its leading intellectuals, such as Eratosthenes the mathematician & geographer, and Heron the inventor (of the world's first steam engine, to name but one). These correspondences comprise almost the whole of what has come down to us from Archimedes' own hand (so to speak - they have been copied & re-copied dozens of times). The mother - necessity - of Archimedes' most famous inventions was the Roman siege of Syracuse during the 2nd Punic War. His booms, winches (including the famous "claw of Archimedes"), catapults, and perhaps even a focusing mirror "ray-gun", held the Romans at bay for two years. Even his death, by the sword of a Roman soldier, was milieuistic. Legend has it that the soldier had ordered Archimedes to "move along" or some such, and Archimedes, deep in some abstruse bit of math, told the soldier to buzz off, with predictable results. Legend also has it that Marcellus, the Roman general leading the siege, was mortified by his soldier's summary execution of the World's Greatest Mathematician & Engineer, and made handsome reparations to Archimedes' family (legend doesn't record if the reparations were taken out the anonymous soldier's hide).

Hirshfeld also covers in some detail the most well-known Archimedean mathematical achievements - the Cattle Problem, the Sand Reckoner, levers & planes, Squaring the Circle, and of course, the flashing Eureka! moment. But he goes a step further by considering these in the context of the mathematical means & methods of the day - how the Greeks were seemingly hamstrung by their inefficient verbal & mathematical symbolism, and Archimedes' clever "work-arounds." Especially, Hirshfeld discusses the tantalising but spotty evidence that Archimedes, in his efforts to compute the area under curves, came very close to the "infinitesimals" that both Newton and Leibniz used in their independent development of The Calculus. In so doing, he also discusses the Greek abhorence for zero, with its embodiment of the Yin-Yang concepts of nothingness and infinity. That a man of this culture could come so close to calculus is even more astonishing than Newton's great leaps, given that by Newton's age the time was ripe.

All of the above are well known to Archimedean fans, but for those new to the subject, I can recommend Hirshfeld's concise summary without hesitation. He sweats the details as required to illuminate the historical context, but never gets bogged down; and he omits them entirely where they would serve no purpose (such as the difficult "On Floating Bodies" treatise).

Part II, "A Palimpsest's Tale" is exactly what it says it is - the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest and the improbable chain of circumstance & narrow escapes by which Archimedes' story & work have come down to us. Historical context is essential to understanding of course, and Hirshfeld doesn't skimp. He gives a good overview of ancient IT - the media, the repositories, the copying, etc, and how it all evolved thru the centuries. Much of Part II duplicates the Palimpsest history as related in The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz & William Noel, but I found Hirshfeld's version to be both more thorough & more concise - he doesn't get side-tracked, for example, by tales of research trips to the Mediterranean.

Finally, a few small complaints. I have spent many frustrating, futile years looking for information on Archimedes the man so my excitement was high when I found Eureka Man. The title says "The life & Legacy of Archimedes". Well, one out of two ain't bad, I guess. Eureka Man offers a thorough & enjoyable account of Archimedes' legacy - his astonishing feats of logic & invention, how they managed to get transmitted to us, and his influence on later scientists. But as far as Archimedes himself . . . well, their just isn't that much to go on, so Hirshfeld, like everyone else, makes do by recreating Archimedes' milieu. He does a good job of it, but I had naively hoped that maybe he'd turned up some new documents or had educed some new insights from the specialist literature (I'm not a scholar, just a devoted fan). So: the title is a bit misleading. My other complaint is that Hirshfeld seems way too uncritical and polite regarding certain theories - if that is the word - of Reviel Netz, co-author of the Archimedes Codex (I mean to post a review of that as well, if I can ever think of a way to keep it under a thousand words).

But those are minor cavils with a book that is both edifying & entertaining. What more could anyone ask? Eureka Man will be a permanent addition to my library, and I'm betting it will be the same for most people who buy it.

I have always had a fascination for ancient history`s famed constructor of mechanical marvels and war machines. Of course I knew that Archimedes was also known for his mathematics (as evidenced in the well-known bathtub Eureka anecdote) but little did I appreciate his significance as a mathematician until I read this book. If, like me, you have little interest in or knowledge of mathematics, you may find the first half of this story a little tedious at times. I skipped over the math puzzles and other more technical parts. Yet the second half of the book detailing the history and rediscovery of the lost Archimedes texts was positively riveting. It was this part of the story that was most memorable, and at times even poignant. This is a story reaching back more than 1000 years from a medieval monastary all the way to a lab in 2005 where modern science resurrected one of antiquity`s greatest minds. You will marvel at the pettiness and greed of human beings and the precarious nature of written knowledge. But in the end, this is a story that will have you cheering: Eureka!

Not very much is known about the life of Archimedes, and when you finish this book it is plain that Alan Hirschfeld did not discover more. So he has padded his short book, in part with a lengthy description of one of Archimedes' math puzzles, in part with overly long historical background, in part with a lengthy description of the palimpsest which contains several of Archimedes' works, and the journey of this palimpsest from Istanbul to New York, via Paris.

Verdict: not worth the price.

I personally find much of this book uninteresting detail although I'm sure it is interesting and important to historians and conservators. But the man himself and his accomplishments stand out as the earliest known example of high-functioning autism. His accomplishments show a mindset far beyond those of ordinary geniuses not only of his own time but on into modern times. Although Newton is considered the founder of integral calculus, Archimedes clearly understood the concepts as well as Newton and was able to apply them. Autism is often associated with inferior social and behavioral characteristics. What failings he had in this area, we only know that he was sometimes careless of dress such as running through the street naked to see the king, a faux pas that has survived the weathering of time.